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Christian Thomasius’s natural law works are usually interpreted as providing a philosophical theory for his positive public law treatises on church and constitutional law. This chapter argues to the contrary that Thomasius’s public law writings are founded not in his natural law but in positive imperial public law as this was received in the state of Brandenburg-Prussia. In this context, the central role of his natural law was as a program for the pedagogical formation of law students.

This chapter discusses the earliest teaching of post-grotian natural law by Henrik Weghorst and Christian Reitzer in Copenhagen in the decades around 1700. This teaching has often been presented as merely derivative of the ideas of Hugo Grotius or Samuel Pufendorf. In contrast, this chapter argues that Weghorst and Reitzer developed two very different, and antagonistic, forms of natural law, reflecting academic teaching in Kiel and in Halle. However, it also shows how Weghorst and Reitzer illustrate the common ground of much Lutheran natural law theorising in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Thus, for all their differences, both gave primacy to natural law and focused on duties, rather than rights, as constitutive of social and political life.

Derrida describes compassion as a “fundamental mode of living together”. In this essay it is contrasted with “stealth torture”, which leaves no visible traces and succeeds in systematically undermining compassion with the victim, in both the community of the perpetrator and of the victim. In Derrida's text, the Hebrew concept of Rachamim plays a decisive role in combination with “perhaps”. On the one hand “rachamim”, “compassion”, forms the plural of “rechem”, “womb”, while being attributed to male figures (including in Judaism and Islam, to God himself); on the other, the word “perhaps” determines Derrida's thought of the future. Torture assaults the “strangeness to oneself” that the “self” is by forcing the victim to betray what could be called compassion for oneself. Derrida's argument resonates with a powerful voice against torture of the early Enlightenment, Christian Thomasius, who identifies such self-betrayal as constitutive of torture. With the iconic image from Abu Ghraib which in intelligence circles is called “crucifixion”, we might be facing a return of the repressed foundation of the United States in a symbol of which a key aspect has been forgotten: That crucifixion was abhorred by the peoples of Antiquity and by Islam as the worst of executions.

The question of Pilate’s innocence is debated with greater sophistication at the end of the seventeenth century than ever before. A liberal professor of law in the city of Halle, Christian Thomasius, is now remembered as one of the master-thinkers of ‘secularization’ in the early Westphalian era. Yet Thomasius is rarely if ever remembered as the author of a highly interesting 1675 text On the Unjust Judgement of Pontius Pilate. Thomasius’ juridical text on Pilate is likely the high point of European legal reasoning on the innocence (or guilt) of Jesus’ Roman judge. However, Thomasius’ 1675 text is written in reply to two other forgotten texts: Pilate Defended, by Johann Steller; and A Refutation of the Defence of Pontius Pilate, by Daniel Hartnaccius. This chapter offers a reading of, and a reflection upon, this collection of early Enlightenment texts on the Roman trial of Jesus.

This chapter considers the context, interpretation, and significance of Dorothea Christiane Erxleben’s Rigorous Investigation of the Causes that Obstruct the Female Sex from Study. In addition to being under-appreciated in its own time, Erxleben’s Rigorous Investigation remains overlooked in ours as an important contribution to feminist thought in the eighteenth century. As I contend, on account of its comprehensive refutation of the specious philosophical, theological, physiological, and psychological grounds for denying women access to study, as well as its advocacy for the necessity and utility of women’s education and for specific and ambitious educational reforms, the Rigorous Investigation deserves a more prominent place in the pantheon of feminist literature.